Discord - Store Beta

As part of launching our boutique store experience, we’re bringing some new games to life for the first time ever. These fancy fresh First on Discord games will be available first on Discord (get it) for PC.

WTF? This is a good thing!? Oh, but how excited I am to get to install another digital platform for games. Man, can never have enough of those… Steam, GoG, Origins… gimme more 'cause I love a fractured marketplace with exclusives!! So consumer-friendly!

Originally Posted by SSIGuy
WTF? This is a good thing!? Oh, but how excited I am to get to install another digital platform for games. Man, can never have enough of those… Steam, GoG, Origins… gimme more 'cause I love a fractured marketplace with exclusives!! So consumer-friendly!

I still think what we need is a decentralised system for game ownership, where we're not locked into one particular platform. I mean, in a sense, Steam is no different than Origin - it's a market controlled by a particular game company. Valve just got there first. I think competition would be a good thing, but we need to solve the problem of proliferating platforms locking us into their particular DRM clients.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore

Originally Posted by SSIGuy
WTF? This is a good thing!? Oh, but how excited I am to get to install another digital platform for games. Man, can never have enough of those… Steam, GoG, Origins… gimme more 'cause I love a fractured marketplace with exclusives!! So consumer-friendly!

Not a good thing but expect more as publishers also want a bigger piece of the pie. It's the same thing happening with all the Netflix clone competitors being launched.

One solution would be a co-operative distribution system, that only takes enough of a cut to cover its operations, and provides economies of scale to all studios and publishers, and one port of call for all customers. I won't hold my breath, though.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore

Originally Posted by Ripper
I still think what we need is a decentralised system for game ownership, where we're not locked into one particular platform. I mean, in a sense, Steam is no different than Origin - it's a market controlled by a particular game company. Valve just got there first. I think competition would be a good thing, but we need to solve the problem of proliferating platforms locking us into their particular DRM clients.

It will be nice to have some sort of "open DRM" platform where multiple store can plug in but the chance of that happening before the sun explode is pretty much nil!

Originally Posted by Couchpotato
Not a good thing but expect more as publishers also want a bigger piece of the pie. It's the same thing happening with all the Netflix clone competitors being launched.

Yeah, I agree… unfortunately. Netflix is a good example. When Disney's service comes online and the existing deals end with Netflix for a lot (all?) of the Disney movies on there (like the recent Stars Wars films, etc), those will only be available on Disney's service, meaning we, the consumers, would need to pony up for yet another streaming service.

Originally Posted by Ripper
I still think what we need is a decentralised system for game ownership, where we're not locked into one particular platform … we need to solve the problem of proliferating platforms locking us into their particular DRM clients.

That would be great but I can't see that ever happening. Even music, which is more mature in the digital space, has streaming locked to your chosen service. While we can buy "unlocked" music still in some places, I think streaming is the next step to eliminating that in order for platforms to control content and customers.

It's hard to imagine what are essentially competing commercial interests ever coming together for the benefit of the consumer.

I do wonder if it might happen, eventually. It seems to me that the status quo will become a hindrance. All these companies are going to want to make savings on the high cut demanded by the middlemen, but customers are going to be lost through a proliferation of platforms.

In a similar way, a huge consortium of big corporates has got together to create a patent-free open-source video codec, AV1. It's just recently been launched, and I expect it to dominate within a few years. They were all tired of paying license fees to the MPEG organisation.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I realise it's a different situation, but I think the reasoning is similar. All these companies dislike paying a heavy cut to a middleman, and in their ideal world they would wish to be the middleman themselves. But, it becomes clear that since everyone feels the same way, no-one is going to want to jump on an alternative that is just controlled by a different competitor. So, a good case arises to say, let's none of us have the benefit of being the greedy middleman, but let's all at least save on paying that cut. That's pretty much why open technologies dominate the web.

-- "Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother." Alan Moore